We have now taken this first step, an all-important one for most people. If you have read thus far, you have learned a great many objective facts about frigidity.
You have learned what it is and the toll it exacts; you have seen why women are subject to it and how it originates in the individual and the different forms it may take. You have seen, too, how woman has attempted to masculinize her personality, how she has tried to eschew sex entirely; and you have seen why these unhappy attempts can be successful, why they are inherent biological and psychological possibilities.
This kind of objective understanding is of great importance. It frees one from prejudice and prevents one from seeking false solutions (which abound); it brings one face to face with the real nature of the dilemma of frigidity, its essentially psychological structure, and it uncovers the hidden area where personal responsibility lies.
Without this kind of objective intellectual understanding the individual woman could not come to direct grips with frigidity, for she would not know its nature. This type of knowledge, then, has carried us to the very edge of the bridge to true womanhood.
In order to cross it, however, the individual woman must do more than merely understand in an objective manner.
The second and all-important step in the resolution of the problem of frigidity requires a subjective approach, an inquiry by the individual woman into the attitudes and emotions that are preventing her from achieving maturity. The kind of knowledge one gains in this way we call insight. If one can get true insight into the attitudes and feelings upon which one’s own frigidity is based, the problem can be completely resolved.
At the moment this may seem like a big order and insight a frightening word. Every woman knows how complex her emotions are, how difficult to understand, how multi-faceted every human being is.
But I wish to tell you now, at the outset, that the whole approach can be kept very simple. Frigidity is like a log jam on a narrow stream. If two or three logs jam together, forming a barrier, all the other logs will jam up behind them, forming a complicated maze that stretches backward sometimes for miles. To release the jam, however, all one has to do is to free the first two or three logs, and then the others will resume their unimpeded journey.
The emotional log jam we call frigidity is held in place by two basically neurotic attitudes. The first is an attitude toward men; the second is an attitude toward real womanhood. We have seen these attitudes in every form of frigidity and have seen how they function. If the individual woman can come to grips with these two attitudes in herself, if she can dislodge them, the free flow of her personality toward health and maturity will resume once again. Insight can dislodge these hindering attitudes and keep them dislodged.
Let us start, then, and see how insight into these attitudes can be achieved by the frigid woman.